Narratology beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life by David Herman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Narratology beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life by David Herman Jan Alber (bio) David Herman. Narratology beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life. Oxford UP, 2018. xiii + 400 pp. ISBN: 978-0-19-085040-1. Hardcover, $99. In Narratology beyond the Human, David Herman zooms in on fictional and nonfictional narratives about animal worlds and human–animal relationships. He seeks to initiate a dialogue between narratology and critical animal studies, an interdisciplinary formation that contests assumptions of radical difference between humans and nonhuman animals. Herman's bionarratology is primarily influenced by Charles Darwin's hypothesis that "humans are caught up in the same evolutionary processes that affect other [End Page 272] animals" (3), which has led to the deconstruction of hierarchical oppositions between humans and other species. Among other things, Herman extends the traditional definition of narrativity in terms of human experientiality by including the representation of the experiences of animal others (156). Furthermore, he demonstrates that the narratives he analyzes have "the potential to alter understandings of our place within a more-than-human world and hence of what constitutes or defines the human" (4). According to Herman, we should all begin to understand that we are merely one (and certainly not the most important) element of the relational interplay between the various forms of creatural life in the world. Narratology beyond the Human consists of an introduction (in which Herman highlights his focus on the post-Darwinian period and relates his approach to other fields and disciplines), a first analytical part that deals with self-narratives (i.e., stories that we use to make sense of and justify our behavior), and a second analytical part that looks at narrative engagements with more-than-human worlds in different media and genres. This work also addresses issues of thought representation and mental-state attribution as well as coda on storytelling at species scale, in which Herman shows that narrative affords the means for modeling phenomena situated at the level of species. In Chapter 1, Herman concentrates on human self-narratives that lose their credibility and move toward types of trans-species relationality. The protagonist of Lauren Groff's short story "Above and Below" (2011), for instance, disentangles herself from her defensive understanding as an academic and becomes aware of her relatedness to the members of other species. Similarly, in the comic Thirteen Cats of My Childhood (2006), Jesse Reklaw shows how the union between the character of Jesse and the family cats initiates a new self-narrative that even enables him to talk back to his father. In Chapter 2, Herman focuses on biomutations—that is, cross-species identifications—in both fictional and nonfictional contexts (by therians, who belong to the larger community that refers to itself as otherkin, for instance). Some of these stories of "species identity disorder" that negotiate hybrid human–animal identities remain within the gravitational pull of human-centric ontologies. Most of them, however, involve a wider ecology of selves, namely a trans-species community in which the human characters participate and by which they are shaped. [End Page 273] In Chapter 3, Herman deals with human–animal relations told in or about therapy sessions. He begins by looking at two autism memoirs—Rupert Isaacson's The Horse Boy (2009) and Nuala Gardner's A Friend Like Henry (2007)—that thematize animal assistants, and he then turns to kinship networks and studies of narratives produced in the context of family therapy. Herman also notes the conflict between two sets of cultural norms—namely, value systems according to which transhuman families pose a threat to anthropocentric traditions, and moral principles that permit members of other species to be considered as part of one's family (112). The second part of the book begins with a chapter on multispecies story-worlds in graphic narratives. Here, Herman extends Franz K. Stanzel's distinction between the authorial and the figural narrative situation beyond the species boundary by presenting a continuum of narrative strategies for projecting nonhuman experiences. At one end of the scale, one can find representations of animal experiences that are reminiscent of authorial narration because they are summative, globalizing, and refracted through human-centered practices...